The 6 Most Horrifying Ways Routine Surgeries Have Gone Wrong

Surgery, no matter how minor, is a scary thing. You have to put yourself entirely at the mercy of total strangers as they cut open your unconscious body and shove their hands into it, trusting that their medical license is some kind of magic talisman that keeps them from doing anything terrible to you while they're poking around in there. Most of the time, everything turns out OK and our fears were all for naught. But every once in a while, a person wakes up from a fairly routine surgical procedure with a stomach stitched full of medical supplies, missing a chunk from their face, or taking dumps out of their freaking wieners.

So let's start with that last one ...

#6. Surgery Causes Man to Start Pooping and Farting Through His Penis

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We're very sorry we had to type that headline.

Delaware resident Joseph Swain had already been through enough by the time he underwent surgery for a reverse colostomy. He was recovering from diverticulitis, a condition wherein a hole forms in the side of your colon because of some cruel injustice you inflicted on a warlock in a past life. Part of his colon had to be removed, which called for the initial colostomy, a procedure in which your poops get delivered into a charming bag to the delight of your friends and family. The reverse colostomy was meant to reattach Swain's healed colon to his anus. Unfortunately, the doctors accidentally stapled his colon to his bladder.

Keith Brofsky/Photodisc/Getty Images"I told you we should've taken a left turn at Albuquerque."

The results were exactly what you think they were -- Swain began passing fecal matter and feculent gas through his urethra. That's right -- Swain was pooping and ripping farts out of his dickhole. In addition to the agonizing torture of squeezing diarrhea through his wang, Swain was at a tremendous risk of serious infection, as well as losing all belief in the existence of a just and benevolent Creator.

Swain had to suffer through two weeks of boiling dickfarts before the mishap was corrected. Once his bodily functions were back to normal, Swain filed a lawsuit against the doctors who performed the reverse colostomy. The doctors maintain that the mishap wasn't their fault, insisting that Swain's terrible ordeal was an unfortunate result of his condition, although we hasten to note that "your colon may staple itself to your bladder" is not one of the documented symptoms of diverticulitis.

#5. Surgeons Leave 16 Items in a Man's Body

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Seventy-four-year-old Dirk Schroeder went into a hospital in Germany to undergo surgery to treat his prostate cancer, which is surprising, because we assumed that all buildings in Germany were terrifying old castles made of chocolate. Everything seemed to go well at first, but for the next several months, Schroeder's pain level gradually intensified to an excruciating degree, which is the opposite of what was supposed to happen. Then one of his nurses noticed a pad of gauze beginning to ooze its way out of one of his surgery wounds. So Schroeder was sent back to the Bavarian Medical Palace, where it was soon discovered that his doctors had left no less than 16 different items in his body, as if they had confused his vivisected torso for the floor of a taxicab.

Stockbyte/Stockbyte/Getty Images"Open him back up; I need somewhere to spit out my gum."

The treasure trove of medical waste left inside Schroeder's body for no conceivable reason included an entire roll of bandages, a compress, several more gauze pads, a fucking needle, and part of a surgical mask, because why the hell not? Evidently the doctors expected Schroeder to die right then and there and were doing their best to turn his body into a time capsule.

It took two additional surgeries to remove all the bullshit they had dropped inside the elderly man's body, putting a whole lot of totally unnecessary strain on a man in his 70s dying of prostate cancer. However, without a doubt the most beautiful detail of this story is the fact that the negligent surgeons refused to apologize or even acknowledge that they had done anything wrong. They went so far as to suggest that the items probably got inside his torso after the surgery, although they knew better than to try to concoct a specific scenario in which more than a dozen items directly related to surgery could've osmosed their way through his skin.

Stockbyte/Stockbyte/Getty Images"Looks like you managed to wedge my keys into your esophagus."

Schroeder sadly succumbed to cancer a few years later, but his family is currently suing the hospital that turned him into a medical waste pinata for $127,000, roughly $8,000 per item that the doctors left inside Schroeder's body and later claimed he crammed in there himself.

#4. Doctors Remove the Wrong Testicle

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A man who elected not to be identified for reasons that will soon become dazzlingly clear went in for surgery at a hospital in Wiltshire, England, to have a cancerous testicle evicted from his scrotum. One would assume that a procedure like that would be fairly straightforward -- the doctor slices open the man's wrinklepurse and cuts out the gonad with the facial scar and sinister goatee, leaving the gonad with the gelled hair and lantern jaw intact. However, due to some spectacular collision of fate and error, the surgeon chopped out the wrong testicle.

BananaStock/BananaStock/Getty Images"Eeny, meeny, miney, moe" really has no place in the OR.

In what we can only assume was a stammering, panicky, medical-tray-juggling recreation of a Mr. Bean sketch, the doctor quickly put the disembodied testicle on ice and called in a plastic surgeon to try to reattach it, because apparently he somehow graduated from medical school by only attending the classes about hacking things off of people and had no idea how to staple balls back in place himself. It was too late, however, so the doctor had no choice but to remove the remaining testicle (the one that was actually full of cancer) and send the patient home, while the hospital courageously pretended that the mishap never occurred.

amanaimagesRF/amana images/Getty Images"Bayside Memorial Hospital, how may I ... what about a testicle? Um ... no hablo ingles, senor."

They were quickly forced to reconsider that position when the patient hired a lawyer to sue the tap-dancing thunderfarts out of the hospital, pending an extensive investigation. A spokesman for the hospital apologized for the "regrettable incident," although sadly his kind words will not reinflate the maligned patient's filleted scrotum.